Runt Worship: How Low Can We Go?

On the list of things JunkThief does not like about San Francisco, high up would be the Bay area’s gay fetish culture. Fetishes are all good and well in the JunkThief book, but the ones here are just so lame and lack creativity.

Leather/S&M? Ew, no, boring, ugly costumes. And cold steel just never has done it for JunkThief. We’re sure they were cool in…1957, but move on for Chrissakes. Bears? Shouldn’t they be called hogs? If JunkThief wanted to fuck the fat and furry crowd he would have diddled with his cousins more often than he did as a youth. Then there’s the local twink fashion crowd who, on the whole, look like little Caucasian Modesto transplants who think they’re urbane because they put $3,000 of H&M duds on mom’s credit cards and hang out at the Bar on the Castro that has a design theme that would have been really chic were it a bar in Omaha back in, say, 1987. Guess all that’s left is Cowboy/Brokeback Mountain drag. Sorry, JunkThief spent enough time in the Great Plains to know what those dudes smell like. No thanks

Sorry, the right fetishes just ain't out here in the fog.

So JunkThief is already feeling twinges of “Things we wish there’d been enough time to have done while in Manhattan.” Salty Miss Jill brought to his attention Runt at the Nowhere Bar on East 14^th on Wednesdays. It’s a night for height challenged men and their admirers. It was started by Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. (We're not sure if it still happens, but it looks like great fun from the various reviews.)

JunkThief may seem like a mere peep pip squeak next to the towering Bryce Digdug, but at 6'2" in sock feet, he would still qualify for the tall club in most people's books. He endured the “Do you play basketball?” comments from relatives as a teen. JunkThief has usually said that his ideal mate is somewhere between 5’7” and 5’9”, and some of his favorite celebs like Jeremy Piven fall into that category, especially the lower end of the scale. But daring to dip below the 5’7” plateau is one of those excitingly taboo and intriguing prospects he has yet to dare himself to explore. It's so wrong that it's right.

All of this shorty chasing/runt ravishing might suggest that JunkThief has some boy-chaser or power play complex which could not be further from the truth. First, the runts must be fully adult, ideally 35 or older and second JunkThief prefers that they be the pursuer,/aggressor which they typically have been in the initial dance of the whole dynamic of short-tall. (JT has never had a beau taller than him.) It’s sort of the Krazy Kat/Ingnaz Mouse dynamic of unlikely pursuit.

In his many years of therapy, JunkThief never got to the topic of his obsession of having those little banty roosters to topple the tower of his manhood. Come to think of it most of his therapists were height challenged Jewish men, but so be it.

One fetish JunkThief would like to see brought to the forefront is the odd appeal of New Jersey transit workers. No, we’re not hot for not surly, chubby 60-year-olds in orthopedic shoes and stinking of Jack-in-the-Box breath, but ones like the guy we’ll call Vinnie (didn’t catch his name but that’s the one we’ve assigned him) on the train yesterday to the airport. This mid-30s surly dude with just the right mix of face fuzz, Italian American lineage, working class Jersey accent and surly attitude was the stuff to fuel JunkThief wet dreams for a week or two. Top it off with that blue uniform and 19^th century transit worker cap adorably slightly askew as he punched JT’s ticket and mumbled, “Newark Liberty is the thud stop. Thud stop!” JT was quivering and mapping out in his head a Jersey transit night at the right bar to lure in the right boys in blue as we had a little fun playing with new takes on the bridge and tunnel trade. We could throw those boys Jello shots as they brought new meaning to the various stops along the Northeast Corridor line. JunkThief and Vinnie could give a whole new meaning to the word “Secaucus.”

As Johnny Cash so eloquently put it, “I Gotta Thing About Trains.”

Why is it that JunkThief has always found working class boys from the Mid-Atlantic States intoxicating but dumb fuck crackers from the South to be, well…dumb fuck crackers from the South? Not that JunkThief hasn’t had his share of Southern boys, but they tend to be over-educated, hyper-intellectual types.

In the meantime JunkThief will be on the prowl for the proper Runt by the Bay. And, no, to date he has yet to spot a single Muni or BART employee that comes anywhere close to embodying something remotely close to hotness.

(Oh, dear, we already tremble thinking of the comments this post will bring, but bring it on. No bring on an appropriately hot and aggressive Jersey transit runt.)